Matt's Random Notes

Djina is very meticulous in giving you a day by day, blow by blow account of the trip. She is the play-by-play announcer of the trip. Frank Gifford for you Monday Night Football fans. I am more of the Don Meredith/Howard Cossell character, sitting in the back, sipping on a tasty drink, and every so often coming up with an insightful comment like, "Boy, were those Ozarks steep!" or "The best upkept places in rural America are the churches and cemeteries." So with this in mind, here we go.

One, Djina is giving our tandem, "The Beast," a bad rap. Sure it's heavy, and old, and breaksdown with the precision of the tides, but it is a recycled, reuseable machine, and, gosh darn, shouldn't we try to reuse whatever we can. Anyways, by the time I get it to the next shop for a little rearwheel work, it should be just fine.
On the same note about recycling and conservation. The amount of energy that could be saved if people in the Midwest and rural east didn't need to maintain an indoors temperature of 57 degree when the ambient outside temperature is 95 would be about the same amount of energy used to send an entire army to a Mideast country to insure a cheap supply of oil. Hmmmmm. Here's an idea. Let's tax carbon usage. The thermostats would be raised and the money raised by the tax could be used to help start us on becoming a sustainable energy power.

On to recycling. Except for the state and national parks, I have not seen a recycling system or bin since Cedar City, Utah. 37 years after Earth Day, and still our country cannot separate aluminum from glass.

Moving On: Yonah has been pushing for short cuts. (Ken calls them "redirections.") He wants to be done with the trip, get home, flop on the couch like a beached seal and play Nintendo DS. After riding 3,000 miles, I can't blame him. So we have taken a few redirections and have saved about 75 miles, one full day, and our knees. The redirections usually mean bigger, flatter roads with big shoulders, more debris and traffic. Djina - "But don't you want to see the picturesque churches, rolling hills of corn and tobacco?" Yonah - "Are you kidding?" Yonah - "If we took 50 from Sacramento, we'd be in D.C. by now."

We stayed at the bicycling ministry in Sebree at the First Baptist Church. For the past 30 years, the minister and his wife have opened the church doors to cyclists on the TransAmerica bike route. They are very sweet. We get a little soft-sell prosletizing, but for clean towels, a room, and a kitchen, I don't mind talking about religion. The church is the center of rural life. It is the youth center, movie house, counseling center, nursery school, community center, etc. all in one. In a place like Davis, there are churches and synagogues, but they don't have so central of a place. That's why you can travel through a town and see boarded up after boarded up business, abandoned trailers, one gas station/mini-mart, and three immaculate looking churches.

The Abe Lincoln birthplace is a great site. You've got this rustic cabin (not the original as it turns out, but similar) surrounded by this mini-Lincoln Memorial structure. The history lesson is that a poor boy with perseverance, strength of character, and intelligence can be president. Perhaps the most moving part of the monument was the Lincoln's family Bible. Much heftier than the last Harry Potter book. It is true Lincoln was a voracious reader, but there were no Borders Books or libraries in the Kentucky wilderness. Amazon.com was 200 years away. So he read four or so books over and over again. Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and Aesop's Fables. He memorized large portions. Here's one tale from Aesop's Fable he learned. The lion and 3 bulls. The lion wanted to eat the bulls, but they stuck together and there was no way. ONe day the bulls got into a fight and didn't speak to each other. The lion ate one. Then the next day, same thing. And the third day the third bull got it. 50 years later Lincoln says, "United we stand, divided we fall."